This article explores the space for public participation during the consenting process for a nationally significant wind energy or carbon capture and storage infrastructure project. Legal obligations to provide opportunities for public involvement in these processes can be found in national, EU and international law. However, an examination of strategic planning policy suggests that in practice, very little will be up for discussion at this stage. This is consistent with a certain mistrust of the public in high-level policy discourse on the technological change thought necessary for climate change mitigation. Legally entrenched rights to participate, coupled with limited opportunities to influence, create the danger that participation becomes a simple bureaucratic hurdle, frustrating for all concerned.

The notion of public participation in environmental decision-making remains ambiguous and unsettled. This article critically reflects on the conceptual nature of participation, focusing on wind energy developments. It points to an overlooked, but conceptually significant, distinction between models of engagement directed to "participation" and those aimed at "public acceptance". By simply offering a shadow of participation, models of public acceptance are problematic and make the normative and substantive justification of the decision inevitably more fragile. Analysing two major wind projects in England and Wales and their underlying legal and policy framework, the article explores the role of mitigation measures and the under-researched potential for developer-led community benefits to provide participatory space. In the light of logic of acceptance, it suggests that the participatory orientation of mitigation measures within planning law should be acknowledged and strengthened, while the potential for community benefits to constitute alternative fora for community participation should be explored.

Global experimentalist governance has emerged within and across a number of international regulatory regimes, but its potential contribution to the global governance of climate change remains largely unexplored. This article investigates the opportunities and barriers to developing global experimentalist governance approaches in the international regulation of climate change technologies, focusing on the recent framework for marine geoengineering under the London Dumping Protocol. It argues that, in the face of the limits of international law in dealing with uncertainty, multilevel distribution of power and regulatory disconnection, global experimentalist governance is attractive to catalyse adaptability, iterative learning, participation and cooperation. Such approach can help rethink the way international law deals with technological development, by emphasizing its problem-solving function.

This article is concerned with public participation and its linkages with appeal rights in planning decisions for major onshore wind farms in England and Denmark. We are particularly interested in how the legal framework shapes the scope of participation and appeals and, more specifically, whether a third party right to appeal (TPRA) has a participatory potential beyond the initial decisionmaking process. Despite structural differences, our analysis shows that in both countries the legal frameworks limit the participatory potential of administrative appeals, either through a restricted third party access to appeal mechanisms or through a restricted scope of review in appeals. Even where access is unrestricted, TPRA can hardly constitute an extension of participation, unless the scope for review is equally extended. Thus, reliance on TPRA as a participatory tool would require changes to the legal framework in both jurisdictions.

The climate crisis puts real pressure on legal guarantees of public participation in decision making. This pressure comes from a number of directions, but we are particularly concerned with the technocratic erosion of routines of participation, in a turn to expertise rather than democracy for legitimate decision making. At the same time, populists resist the constraints imposed on their power by legal rights of participation. We argue, however, that the climate crisis, while putting pressure on participation, also reinforces its necessity, and the limitations of technocratic decision making. Politics is unavoidable, even and especially in a crisis. Law, or its silence, contributes to the context, the place, and the meaning of participation, and we study its strangely underexplored role in shaping participation on the ground.